MAR is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real world mobile environment, whose elements are augmented by sensory input, such as sounds or graphics. Although it is just a very young technology, academia and industry community both foresee a rapid growth of it in this field.
As mobile devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated with a GPU, GPS and a set of sensors, some ubiquitous services such as indoor navigation, real-time image search become possible.
Therefore, real-time is a key property of MAR, especially for interaction. However, rendering and image processing such as SURF (SURF=speed up robust features) feature detection as well as tracking and registration are very time-consuming while mobile devices are armed with limited resources in comparison to personal computer and server. Poor application performance and terrible user experience are resulted if the problem is handled in traditional way.
Recently, scholars developed some methods to improve MAR through reasonable scheduling but they are still not mature enough to take advantage of resources and do not improve the performance significantly.